Why the ‘nobility complex’ is the design issue we all need to deal with

Video is a powerful medium for conveying ideas. When your customers want to understand something, showing exact actions is clearer and easier to follow along with than lengthy lists of steps or long paragraphs of text.

Using video in your knowledge base can supplement written answers with engaging, visual mini-demonstrations that increase accessibility for all skill levels and across language barriers. Let’s explore when and why you should use video in your knowledge base — along with tips and tricks to enhance your content.

When to use video in your knowledge base

As customers have greater access to decent broadband internet speeds, video becomes a more practical, appealing, and expected option. Research says that 72% of customers prefer video over text when learning about a product or service.

Social media, mobile phones, chat tools, email, and CRM tools are increasingly focused on making video easily embeddable and viewable in their platforms. Customer experience thought leader Shep Hyken says:

The content is easier to show than to describe. Video can explain steps more naturally and fluidly than text or screenshots can. Lengthy lists of steps or a complex task can be cumbersome for the customer to follow along with. A good example is describing how to tie a bowtie; the manual motions are much easier to show than to describe
The content is frequently visited. Invest video production time into answering common questions where the effort will pay off many times over, and create space for your team to focus on the more challenging, less-common issues.
You want to create an emotional reaction to your content. Conveying emotion is easier through video, and creating a positive emotional reaction to your business helps build customer loyalty and trust.
The content changes infrequently. For use cases where a part of your product doesn’t change often, a video can provide significant benefit to your users by being referenced and reused often. Investing the time to have a nicely produced, visually interesting video is well worth it in these cases.
You’re documenting frequent changes. Not all video content needs to be highly produced and long term. Small, easily replaced or updated videos can be a powerful tool for illustrating product changes, particularly if you don’t need to update a voiceover at the same time.